===Black bars in full screen video playback on multi-headed desktops===

The Flash plugin has a known bug where the full screen mode does not really work when you have a multi-monitor setup. Apparently, it incorrectly determines the full screen resolution, so the full screen flash player fills the correct monitor but gets scaled as if the monitor had the resolution of the total display area.

The Flash plugin has a known bug where the full screen mode does not really work when you have a multi-monitor setup. Apparently, it incorrectly determines the full screen resolution, so the full screen flash player fills the correct monitor but gets scaled as if the monitor had the resolution of the total display area.

Flash Player

Gnash

GNU Gnash is the free (libre) alternative to Adobe Flash Player. Gnash is available both as a standalone player for desktop computers and embedded devices, as well as a plugin for several browsers. You can install its package from the community repository: gnash-gtk

Adobe Flash Player

Epiphany

Note that for Epiphany, you have to wrap Adobe Flash Player in the same fashion as described for x86_64. See Epiphany#Flash for more details.

Misc

In addition, it may be needed to install ttf-ms-fontsAUR from the AUR in order to properly render text.

Configuration

To change general plug-in preferences (privacy settings, resource usage, etc.), right click on embedded Flash content and choose preferences from the menu, or go to the Macromedia website. There, a Flash animation will give access to local settings.

You can make your own settings file for Flash, just use the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg. Example config below:

PDF viewer

Evince

Adobe Reader

Due to licensing restrictions, Adobe Reader cannot be distributed from any of the official Arch Linux repositories. There are versions available in the AUR. Please note that no matter how many votes it receives, Adobe Reader will never be included in the official repositories. See this comment for an explanation.

32-bit

It installs the Acrobat Reader application as well as the Firefox plugin. Note that hardware-assisted rendering is unavailable under Linux (at least using a Geforce 8600GTS with driver version 185.18.14).

64-bit

Adobe Reader is a closed-source application, meaning that users desiring a 64-bit binary have no other choice other than to wait for official support. Workarounds to be considered:

Follow this guide originally posted in the forums. It involves creating a chrooted environment that could be reused for other 32-bit only applications.

Or, simply get the 32-bit binary along with the 32-bit dependencies. Install bin32-acroreadAUR. Also, consider installing the extra font packages suggested by the package. Be advised that the Firefox plugin cannot be used directly with this binary -- it will not load in the 64-bit browser. nspluginwrapper-flashAUR is required to load the plugin. Finally, be sure to run:

$ nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

as a normal user. This checks the plugin directory and links the plugins as needed. Everything should work as expected now.

Other

Mozplugger

Troubleshooting

Bad (choppy) sound on 64bit flashplugin

There is a problem with flashplugin 11 64bit and a new memcpy routine in glibc, which makes the sound choppy on mp3 streams (more info here: [1]. Current workarounds are either replacing the memcopy routine like suggested in the mentioned thread or using flashplugin-squareAUR from the AUR.

Flash blocks sound and/or delayed playback

If sound is delayed within flash video and/or if Flash stops sound from any other application, then make sure you do not have snd_pcm_oss module loaded:

$ lsmod | grep snd_pcm_oss

You can unload it

# rmmod snd_pcm_oss

and restart the browser to see if it helps.

No sound in Flash

Flash Player outputs its sound only through the default ALSA device, which is number 0. If you have multiple sound devices (a very common example is having a sound card and HDMI output in video card), then your preferred device may have a different number.
For example:

In this case, HDMI output is "card 0" and sound card is "card 1". To make it default for ALSA, create a file named ~/.asoundrc with the following content:

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

Flash performance

Adobe's Flash plugin has some serious performance issues, especially when CPU frequency scaling is used. There seems to be a policy not to use the whole CPU workload, so the frequency scaling governor does not clock the CPU any higher. To work around this issue, see: cpufrequtils#Changing the ondemand governor's threshold

Plugins are installed but not working

A common problem is that the plugin path is unset. This typically occurs on a new install, when the user has not re-logged in before running Firefox after the installation. Test if the path is unset:

echo $MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH

If unset, then either re-login, or source /etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh and start Firefox from the same shell:

. /etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh && firefox

Gecko Media Player will not play Apple trailers

If Apple Trailers appear to start to play and then fail, try setting the user agent for your browser to:

QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)

Low webcam resolution in Flash

If your webcam has low resolution in Flash (the image looks very pixelated) you can try starting your browser with this:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so chromium

Black bars in full screen video playback on multi-headed desktops

The Flash plugin has a known bug where the full screen mode does not really work when you have a multi-monitor setup. Apparently, it incorrectly determines the full screen resolution, so the full screen flash player fills the correct monitor but gets scaled as if the monitor had the resolution of the total display area.

To fix this, you can use the "hack" described here. Simply download the source from the link given on the page, and follow the instructions in the README.

Note: While the author mentions using Nvidia's TwinView, the hack should work for any multi-monitor setup.

Blue tint on videos with Flash and Nvidia

An issue with flashplugin versions 11.2.202.228-1 and 11.2.202.233-1 causes it to send the U/V panes in the incorrect order resulting in a blue tint on certain videos. There are a few potential fixes for this bug:

Right click on a video, select 'Settings...' and untick 'Enable hardware acceleration'. Reload the page for it to take affect. Note that this disables GPU acceleration.

Downgrade Flash to version 11.1.102.63-1 at most

Use Google Chrome with the new Pepper API.

Try one of the few Flash alternatives.

The merits of each are discussed in this thread. To summarize: if you want all flash sites (youtube, vimeo, etc) to work properly in non-Chrome browsers, without feature regressions (such as losing hardware acceleration), without crashes/instability (enabling hardware decoding), without security concerns (multiple CVEs against older flash versions) and without breaking the vdpau tracing library from its intended purpose, the LEAST objectionable is to install libvdpau-git-flashpatchAUR.

Leaking overlay with Flash and Nvidia

This bug is due to the incorrect colour key being used by the flashplugin version 11.2.202.228-1 [3] and causes the flash content to "leak" into other pages or solid black backgrounds. To avoid this issue simply export VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1 within either your shell profile (E.g. ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zprofile) or ~/.xinitrc

Flash videos not working on older systems

If you have Abobe Flash installed on an older system and you start playing a video which simply turns black with nothing happeing, it is most likely that your CPU does not support SSE2. You can simply check out this by looking at your CPU flags with this command: